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So, I'm starting a brand-new project in Java, and am considering using Spring. Why am I considering Spring? Because lots of people tell me I should use Spring! Seriously, any time I've tried to get people to explain what exactly Spring is or what it does, they can never give me a straight answer. I've checked the intros on the SpringSource site, and they're either really complicated or really tutorial-focused, and none of them give me a good idea of why I should be using it, or how it will make my life easier. Sometimes people throw around the term "dependency injection", which just confuses me even more, because I think I have a different understanding of what that term means.
Anyway, here's a little about my background and my app :
Been developing in Java for a while, doing back-end web development. Yes, I do a ton of unit testing. To facilitate this, I typically make (at least) two versions of a method : one that uses instance variables, and one that only uses variables that are passed in to the method. The one that uses instance variables calls the other one, supplying the instance variables. When it comes time to unit test, I use Mockito to mock up the objects and then make calls to the method that doesn't use instance variables. This is what I've always understood "dependency injection" to be.
My app is pretty simple, from a CS perspective. Small project, 1-2 developers to start with. Mostly CRUD-type operations with a a bunch of search thrown in. Basically a bunch of RESTful web services, plus a web front-end and then eventually some mobile clients. I'm thinking of doing the front-end in straight HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery, so no real plans to use JSP. Using Hibernate as an ORM, and Jersey to implement the webservices.
I've already started coding, and am really eager to get a demo out there that I can shop around and see if anyone wants to invest. So obviously time is of the essence. I understand Spring has quite the learning curve, plus it looks like it necessitates a whole bunch of XML configuration, which I typically try to avoid like the plague. But if it can make my life easier and (especially) if make it can make development and testing faster, I'm willing to bite the bullet and learn Spring.
So please. Educate me. Should I use Spring? Why or why not?
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closed as not constructive by gnat, maple_shaft♦ Jun 15 '12 at 13:03
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
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Spring is a framework that helps you to "wire" different components together. It is most useful in cases where you have a lot of components and you might decide to combine them in different ways, or wish to make it easy to swap out one component for another depending on different settings or environments.
I would suggest a different definition:
"Dependency injection is where you design your classes so that they expect an outside actor to directly give them the sub-tools they need to do their jobs before anybody starts asking them to do something."
Most of the XML (or annotation-based) stuff is telling spring:
In this way, Spring lets your connect components, label them, control their lifecycle/caching, and alter behavior based on configuration.
That sounds like a lot of overhead for not a lot of benefit for me. I would suggest that you make your instance variables
protected or package-level, and then locate the unit tests inside the same package. That way you can alter or test the instance variables in-place.
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First, what is dependency injection?
Simple. You have a class, it has a private field (set to null) and you declare a public setter that provides the value for that field. In other words, the dependency of the class (the field) is being injected by an external class (via the setter). That's it. Nothing magical.
Second, Spring can be used without XML (or very little)
If you dive in with Spring 3.0.5.GA or higher then you can use the dependency injection support from JDK6+. This means that you can wire up dependencies using the
@Component and @Resourceannotations.
Why use Spring at all?
Obviously, dependency injection promotes very easy unit testing since all your classes have setters for the important dependencies and these can be easily mocked using your favourite mocking framework to provide the required behaviour.
That aside, Spring also provides a lot of templates which act as base classes to make using the JEE standard technologies a breeze to work with. For example, the JdbcTemplate works well with JDBC, the JpaTemplate does good things with JPA, JmsTemplate makes JMS pretty straightforward. The RestTemplate is simply awesome in it's simplicity. For example:
and you're done. The parameters are injected and you just need to provide JAXB annotations for MyJaxbObject. That should take no time at all if you've auto-generated them from an XSD using the Maven JAXB plugin. Note that there was no casting going on there, nor was there a need to declare a marshaller. It's all done for you.
I could burble on forever about the wonders of Spring, but maybe the best thing to do is try out a simple code spike where you attempt to wire up a RESTful web service to pump out data from an injected DAO that supports transactions.
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